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Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Remakes

Remakes are a funny thing. You take
a movie/television show that’s already been made and attempt to update it and
recapture that old magic. Occasionally, it even works.

You see it often in movies and
television (Hollywood prefers things that come with built-in audiences), but
not as much with books. However, we do have a good one with the updates of the
classic fairytales Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood that take the form of CINDER and SCARLET by Marissa Meyer. Although the original stories aren’t novels by a long shot,
the result is in the same spirit of the greatest remakes: fresh, its own
creature, full of echoes of the original.

Another “remade” book is WICKED,
done by Gregory Maguire to show the other side of the Wizard of Oz by L. Frank
Baum (he’s also got MIRROR, MIRROR, a retelling of Snow white). Yes, fairy tales do seem to be popular stories to
remake.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES by
Seth Grahme-Smith is a good book, but I’m not sure it qualifies as a true
remake. It’s a parody, a rewrite with a specific idea in mind to change the
original, rather than a reworking of the original material. There’s also the
I-can’t-decide-if-they-really-suck-or-are-actually-okay Frankenstein “sequels”
by Dean Koontz. They
aren’t true remakes since they take place after the original book is supposed
to, but a great deal of the original story was changed to fit what he wanted. However,
it doesn’t have much spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel. I don’t think they count.
It doesn’t help that I’m leaning towards “they suck” right now.

I think the success of CINDER and
WICKED means book remakes will only become more popular. Whether they’ll be
good, though, remains to be seen.

Do you guys know of any book
remakes? What do you think of them, yay or nay?

5 comments:

I don't mind them so much, however it can get to the point of being overdone. I mean, how many more versions of Snow White do we really need? And then I read a book like Snow Whyte and the Queen of Mayhem and was really surprised how good that was. I say if you can do a fitting retelling, go for it (but seriously, there are other Brothers Grimm stories SCREAMING for a retelling). :)

Well, Bridget Jones's Diary was a retelling of Pride & Prejudice, at least according to Helen Fielding. To a certain extent, all stories are retellings of others. And fairy tales are kind of amalgams of stories developed in French salons (I'm probably remembering this wrong, and I'm not in a go-and-look-it-up frame of mind). So, I'm not against it per se.